silverowl

Tom and Averil arrived early at the recent launch of my memoir The Notetaker at the Paekakariki Railway Station tearooms. As we always did, we immediately talked about Van Morrison. Back in the mid-seventies Tom had roared into the Listener a wild red-haired Celtic tornado and at first meet we got on to another red-haired Celtic tornado Van Morrison, Tom asking if I had heard ‘Bulbs’ on Veedon Fleece. The album had only just come out but Tom was already well-versed, so to speak. Here we go again, all these years later. When you are devoted fans of Van the Man, half a century is irrelevant, it is essential to pay your dues to the porky wee Belfast boy. With Van referenced, I thanked Tom for the front and back cartoons of me and for prompting the title of my memoir. I had been struggling to move past the bland ‘Vocation’ when I noticed my framed cartoons on the wall. Tom drew me as the mad bearded fella on the back cover and the Scotty bonneted front cartoon, both taking notes. Thus, the obvious title for a memoirist who had been taking notes since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. ‘I was wondering, Tom,’ I said at the launch. ‘Could you give me a quote for the book?.’ No problem, he said. I sent a few blurb ideas. He said he could do better than that and did. ‘Reminds me of Clive James’ Unreliable Memoirs,’ he texted. ‘Except yours are reliable because you are a notetaker. You were there for Jimi Hendrix’ last concert and the Brian Jones concert in Hyde Park and other memorable stories, including description of your life in the seminary. A [...]

Reviewed by Dr Michael O’Leary 1/9/26   Subtitled ‘The Ultimate Memoir’ this autobiography by Paekākāriki author, David McGill, is a summation of a lifetime career as a writer in several manifestations. His writing work began early as a ‘notetaker’ literally taking notes of people and events of his childhood and teenage in order to try and make sense of the world. Later in life he would be amazed that he would be ‘allowed’ to become a WRITER, a description he thought could never be to be applied to someone of his background. However, a WRITER he did become. His writing falls neatly into what might be described as Four Fab and distinct periods: 1) Poet /Priest 2) Teacher 3) Journalist/Freelance author 4) Fictionaire/Publisher Perhaps because David McGill didn’t quite know the full extent of his ‘Irishness’ when he left school he was unaware that being a priest or a poet were the two main identifications of that particular race. Finding out later in life would change his whole perspective on who and why he was like he was. Suffice to say at the early stage of his life he was a failure at attempts to be either a priest or a poet. After time in the seminary, he realised the world outside was more his domain, he preferred the temptations of the flesh and the literature of books on the ‘list’ banned by the Vatican. As for being a poet he listened to his mother, as every boy should, who when he showed her his first published verse said: ‘Well done dear … You’ll get over that stuff’. His father was less encouraging, telling him he would not spend another penny on him and what [...]

Before Michael O'Leary launches The Notetaker, I would like to note he identified the reason for my tendency to put my foot in it. I should have got it when Tom Scott drew these two versions of me notetaking – indeed Tom inspired this title with both versions taking notes. On the front I wear the Scottish bonnet, the tartan there above the earnest dork. On the back you see a wilder, bearded version. In between is my account of my life as a writer, based on the diaries and notes I have always taken. The front image of the Scot dominated most of my life. I had a McGill tartan made and wore it proudly at book launches. I held whisky and haggis parties. I felt Scottish Kiwi. Dad encouraged this, steering me early on to Robert Louis Stevenson and the virtues of hard work, honesty and thrift. He was a follower of the First Labour Government’s welfare state, Prime Minister Peter Fraser, a Scotsman, almost up there with Winston Churchill. Dad wanted a better future for the country and a better start than he had. He wanted all five children to get a good education and to read. This he achieved. There was no talk about our Irish side, the two Irish grandmothers. Nana was lovely, and her daughter my mother had the same ebullient nature. When I got a bit carried away, Dad would say it was my mother coming out in me. One glass of Pimms No 1 and mum was away laughing, often a tad too much. Grandma lived with us. She was dour, severe hair in a tight bun trapped by many bobby pins, a corset constraining her [...]

The President of the NZ Law Society rang to say he was suing me for defalcations. I had to get him to explain what defalcations were. Theft. Okay. My last interaction with a top lawyer was when he asked me to represent him representing my claim against fellow directors of a publishing company because he was off on holiday. Because I did his job, he took a third off the $3000 fee. The president could not be suing over that. I asked what I was supposed to have stolen. ‘The lawyer in question,’ he explained in a world-weary voice, ‘is probably going to jail.’ I took the implication that I could follow Brian to the clink. Images of the grim granite walls of Mt Eden Gaol we looked down on from our fourth form class at St Peters, the Christian Brother predicting some of us would end up there. I thought he was looking at me. I pleaded for information. Ah, yes, Brian had got me involved in fund-raising among lawyers to pay for me to write a biography of celebrated Wellington criminal lawyer Roy Stacey. Despite much publicity in the Law Journal and in media, we raised just over $300. We agreed to shelve the book, Brian promised to put the money in a trust fund until he could reimburse subscribers. Where, the President wanted to know, was the money given to us by the people he represented? I didn’t know. I suppose the President as a criminal lawyer himself, learning its finer points from Roy, heard a lot of Not Guilty pleas. He said he would look into this alleged trust fund. I never heard back. I did hear Brian went to jail. [...]

My last day in Sydney before flying to Vienna in 1968 I was drowning. I had been reading the Sunday shriek sheets with a friend at the empty end of Palm Beach. I needed a dip to clear the head of the Coonawarra claret of the night before. In I went into the gorgeous blue sea. I didn’t have to do much. The sea was taking me out in an effortless drift. Then I went under. I surfaced and tried swimming, to no avail. I was heading fast the wrong way. Under I went. I remembered to raise a hand for help, forgetting to keep my mouth shut. The current seemed to be accelerating down my throat. There was a flash of sunlight above as I was taken into the watery unknown. I was aware that I was helpless and was a goner. I felt strangely resigned to my fate. I was disappointed that my life did not flash before my eyes. What did was a sense of regret that I would not be flying off to the Old World tomorrow, that I would not see Vienna, City of Song and Dreams. I scarcely registered being bumped on both sides. It was enough I was not getting hunks torn out of me. ‘Hold our shoulders!’ somebody yelled. I tried to do so, swallowing more seawater. I could feel the solid muscles of their shoulders as they back pedalled to the shore, cursing the current making the job so difficult. They dragged me up the beach a little way and dumped me. ‘Didn’t you see the farkin signs?’ ‘Eh?’ ‘No swimming.’ ‘Yeh. Didn’t it occur to you there was a reason nobody else was swimming down [...]

You will know some variation on the joke about the Scotsman and the Irishman in the pub, the Irishman wants a drink, the Scotsman does not want to pay for it. What it took me a long time to realise was that the Irish and Scots sides of me were engaged in a constant tug-of-war. I am telling you this because the man here who is launching my book The Notetaker, Michael O’Leary, was the one who made me realise what was going on in me. I had always thought of myself as predominantly Scottish. I wear my McGill tartan to prove it. You can see it in the bonnet on the Tom Scott cover. But turn the book over and there is a wild looking version Tom also drew. My father wanted all his children to get a good education and read, and we did. Robert Louis Stevenson remains a favourite, without twigging to the implications for me of the Jekyll and Hyde story. We had a lovely Irish nana we adored. What we did not perceive was that the other grandmother who lived with us was also Irish. The Irish were dismissed as tinkers and thieves. Any excitable behaviour in us children, particularly in me, Dad dismissed as your mother coming out in you. Mum was good on the cuddling like her mother, our nana. We did notice that one glass of Pimms No 1 and mum was away laughing, maybe a tad too much. I wanted to do the right thing by my parents and train to be a priest. Once I got outside their ken, I bunked off from the seminary to see banned films like Peyton Place and read dodgy [...]

Mick Jagger was writhing around on the studio floor like a real-life Gollum. The speakers were blasting out I Can’t Get No Satisfaction and Mick looked in dire need of a good feed. He was smaller and thinner than I expected. He had his significant lips around the microphone and was crouched over it, thin T-shirt and those black Viet Cong pyjamas and bare feet. There seemed to be a lot of floor crew, guys behind Dalek-like cameras on castors, guys holding reels of electrical cord, young women clasping clipboards to their bosoms, and all eyes were fixed on this diminutive figure. I had just arrived at the new London Weekend Television studios mid-afternoon in November 1969 with instructions from family-oriented TV Times to get a story on the Stones or not bother coming back to the office. This was going to be my first big story. It had to be better than my first effort with Skippy the Kangaroo, who ignored my questions and trashed the Thames Television studio, injuring several staff before he received a pacifying injection. ‘What’s Mick doing?’ I asked the young woman next to me. ‘Bleedin’ obvious, in’it?’ She peered at her clipboard, then marched away. I waited for Mick to finish trying it on with the lyrics and the mike, then as the song ended, I approached. ‘Um, Mick? Simulated oral sex, right?’ He slowly looked up, an evil Gollum grin. Then he gave a signal with the mike and the thunderous opening of Satisfaction began again. He returned to his love affair with his mike. I looked around for the other members of the band. They were in a group, Keith and Bill with guitars pointed at Charlie’s drums. [...]

Wellington Town Hall November 23, 1979, was for me a proud, daunting and uncomfortable moment. I was placed in the centre front of the dress circle, flanked by guests and dignitaries, as Michi Inoue raised his baton at 6pm for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra to begin its Amnesty International Benefit Concert with the quintessentially Kiwi Aotearoa Overture by Douglas Lilburn. The composer was discreetly seated behind me, but more of that later. This was surely a sacred and secular occasion. I had grown up in the Bay of Plenty and Auckland equating sacred music with the Latin masses where I participated as an altar boy. ‘Sanctus! Sanctus! Sanctus!’ sang the congregation, led by the choir from the church’s version of the dress circle. Sacred music was in mysterious Latin. Secular music was in English, usually American English, what we heard on the Request Session on the radio, Perry Como warbling ‘Magic Moments’, if we were lucky Elvis singing ‘You Ain’t Nothin but a Hound dog’, if we were unlucky Mantovani’s syrupy strings. Jesuit priest Father Bernard O’Brien demonstrated how glorious secular music was. At Holy Name Seminary he required us teenage minor seminarians to shut up while he listened to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto by Nathan Milstein. We would have preferred Elvis, it being 1957. After several enforced repeats, Beethoven mysteriously transmogrified from excruciating to interesting and some of us were converted to secular music. The priest further expanded our horizons by bringing poet Denis Glover to deliver his famous magpie poem accompanied by his ‘Sings Harry’ poems set to music by New Zealand composer Douglas Lilburn. I had not known we had composers, I thought they all came from Europe like Beethoven. I abandoned [...]

Screenwriters talk about finding the inciting moment when the drama kicks in. With us more leisurely book writers it is not so easy to identify an inciting moment. I have written six memoirs of life segments such as rock ‘n’ roll, food, childhood, OE. This seventh memoir The Notetaker revisits all my notes and diaries and after writing it I can identify the inciting moment. It was not apparent at the time. Indeed, I only had the hefty pay packet and the even heftier expenses keeping me working for five years from 1968 at TV Times in Tottenham Court Road, London. I never cared at the time to be known as a feature writer for TV Times. It meant little it was the biggest magazine in Europe. I was at the beck and call of a daft features editor who sent me off on assignments such as interviewing the Carry On Camping cast about their favourite hangover cures, stars like Long John Baldry and Adrienne Corri about the beds they sleep in. Sure, it was nice spending a day with Ronnie Barker looking at his saucy postcards and Donald Sinden showing me his theatrical walking sticks. But there was little opportunity to write anything I cared about, except perhaps for poverty in Liverpool, which provoked the Lord Mayor to sue the magazine and my features editor to ask if I was influenced by communists. The nadir had to be Stars and their Pets, particularly Pat Phoenix and the biggest dog in Britain. When I got back to the office, the other feature writers wanted me to reveal all at the usual three-hour pub lunch. Instead, I resiled from that and walked to Holborn Library to [...]

The evening of 21 August 1968 I was at the Royal Albert Hall in London to see Dimitri Rostropovich and the Soviet State Orchestra perform Dvorak’s Cello Concerto. That morning Russia and other Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia to crush Dubcek’s Prague Spring. The booing reached a crescendo as the orchestra made its way on stage. The great Russian cellist emerged, held up his bow until there was quiet. Rostropovich played with tears streaming down his face and at the end held up the conductor’s score. We filed quietly out of the most dramatic concert I have attended. This was a poignant highlight of many during five years in London. I saw Margot Fonteyn dance Tchaikovsky’s dying swan, her partner Rudolf Nureyev. I saw his Romeo and Juliet where he made three mighty leaps from the flies to land on the boards with an almighty crash followed by 20 minutes of clapping and cheering. I saw Colin Davis conduct the eight-hour Berlioz Les Troyens, Pierre Boulez conduct the Proms, Otto Klemperer at the Festival Hall, I drove to Ely to see Sviatoslav Richter play Brahms Piano Concerto 2. For the three months I lived in Cambridge, the King’s College Choir was my local. I spent the day with Michael Bentine at the Albert Hall developing his presentation, ping pong balls firing from a cannon into the audience in Tchaikovsky’s 1812. I interviewed Daniel Barenboim and Andre Previn. I have recreated this London period from my ring binder notebooks in my new book The Notetaker, which draws on a lifetime habit of filling notebooks and diaries. My love of classical music might never have developed if not for a priest known to us as Dimbulb because [...]